Where's the Outrage?
Palantir, techno-authoritarian, and the forfeiting of our future
Our future is being stolen from us by a technocratic authoritarian regime lacking empathy or wisdom. So why aren't we in America more outraged?
While the U.S. military launches unpopular wars and the Trump regime ruins our economy and our environmental future, Palantir is building a database of every American citizen, including our financial transactions, health data, and social media preferences.
In this video, I look at the Palantir manifesto, the Karp–Thiel–Vance circle, and the new militarized masculinity now dominating the American right: a strange synthesis of Silicon Valley master-class fantasy, evangelical eschatology, and reactionary nostalgia for an industrial past. I then step back from the news cycle to ask a deeper question — how was this passive American public produced in the first place? Why do we seem unable to fight back effectively against this ruinous agenda?
Drawing on Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies, Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society, Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders, and Antonio Negri on the "production" of subjectivity, I argue hat the reactionary right unleashed a counter-strike against a long, incomplete, "feminization" of culture. A therapeutic, communicative, victim-centered ethic took over the professional managerial class over the last several decades. While the right promotes contempt, nationalism, and violence, progressives cling to an identity based on victimization, administrative protocols, and virtue signaling. Neither side offers a way out. In this emergency, we must define a new way forward.
As AI leads to mass layoffs and the war leads to spikes in costs, we need to develop resilience, understanding ourselves as participatory agents grounded in embodied presence, building class solidarity. The future is high-stakes community engagement, as we saw in Minneapolis last year. We must reject both the victim-identity of weak progressivism and the techno-authoritarian "toxic masculine" project of the new right, as we come together to fight for our future.
I agree with your calling out the lack of actionable outrage. And since I do not believe in coincidences, I want to thank John Powell for making me aware of Negri, and after a brief review, say his goals are exactly the solution- to work toward creating "A decentralized and non-hierarchical form of organization that is based on networks and cooperation." But I agree with John that without a self-transformative approach, things like "embodied presence" will not make sense. This is where worldview literacy comes in as relates to returning to a well-articulated list of proven sustainable worldview precepts. See worldviewliteracy.org.'
I admire these articles of yours, their wit and readability and range. But it sounds too Negri-like to issue formulaic exhortations to people to "develop resilience, understanding ourselves as participatory agents grounded in embodied presence". Who is going to know what embodied presence is? It's jargon, even if it means something to Negri, the workers won't be on board. Change is unlikely to be enacted through such language.